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Tag Archives: spring cleaning

For the past few weekends, we’ve been doing some Fall Sprucing. It’s like spring cleaning, except you do it just before fall. I have always thought that fall feels more like a fresh start than spring. This is probably due to the school calendar. The end of the summer turns into the start of the school year, which has always meant new school supplies, new clothes, a fresh haircut, and a fresh start. Even after graduating college, I still feel that the fall is a beginning . . and not just the beginning of the end.

During this time of year, I like to clean up around the house, try out a new hair color, buy school office supplies, shop for new clothing, and rejuvenate any resolutions I made in January that have slipped my mind during the summer months. The fall sprucing this year started with a trip to Bombshell Salon for a daring new hair color. I expected to get my usual dark chocolate brown, but my hair stylist talked me into a panel of bright red in the front.

After the hair salon kickoff, I decided to tackle a house project that Kyle and I have meant to take care of for a few weeks. We finally painted our front door a fun color! We have a white house with a white front door, so we have desperately needed a pop of color. After living with several paint chips taped to our front door for a week (sorry, neighbors. . .), we decided on Valspar Green Gecko (6006-8A).

After the door was painted, we were surprised to find that Kyle had chosen the exact same shade for our door as he had for his iPhone 5c. It’s almost a perfect match! We also installed some modern house numbers, which was a fun adventure to say the least. I think we tried five different drill bits before we found the right size to fit the anchors and posts for these numbers, but finally it is done, and we love it.

I carried the momentum into Labor Day weekend, when I decided to go after a big house project that I had put off for years. I finally went through every piece of clothing in my closet and dresser and decided what to keep, sell, or donate. Yes, every piece. Including the sock drawer and my stack of denim. I can never bear to part with a pair of jeans, no matter how ratty or ill-fitting. So many memories! I found pairs of flare cut jeans from college, maybe even high school. Did you ever have a pair of these supremely cool Lucky brand jeans?

For someone who now wears heels once every three months, I have a pretty sizable collection of heels. Pictured here, about a quarter of what I found. That’s right, I had about 50 pairs of heels. If I wore heels one day a week, I could go a year without repeating a pair. And I don’t wear heels anymore.

But I still kept about 15 pairs! Someday, I might want to wear heels again, and I wouldn’t want to start from scratch. So I may still have a little ways to go before I have a simplified closet, but I did end up with four garbage bags full of perfectly good clothing to donate, just because it’s not my style, I don’t love it, or it doesn’t fit my body exactly how I want it to. If you’re interested in taking the same (very helpful) approach that I did, I highly recommend that you check out How to Organize a Closet You’ll Love.

The final item on the list I have been working for our fall sprucing project is cleaning up our diets. We are so far from perfect on this, but I have been incorporating a lot more home cooked clean eating meals into our weekly meal plan. My favorite cookbook lately has been Clean Food by Terry Walters. Kyle and I have noticed that we feel so much better when we are eating a healthy vegetarian diet with a variety of nutrient sources. It is a lot easier to do this in the summer with an abundance of local fruits and vegetables, so we really have no excuse this month; we’re eating as clean as we can.